Depending on how you look at it, this article is months – or even years – overdue. The podcast landscape evolves rapidly, with each year bringing new developments. Thanks to our agility, we’re able to capture attention and achieve success in unprecedented ways. However, moving quickly sometimes means we don’t fully comprehend the entire situation.

This is how I feel about video podcasting today. It has created significant anxiety for those without a clear path forward—and even for those who do have direction, as we’re still in the early stages of this next wave in the podcast industry.

So, Tom, Gavin, Lauren, and I have decided to do two things to solve that.

The first is a two-part article, starting below and continuing in the next few weeks, walking you through how video podcasting works on Spotify and the changes from their RSS-based experience.

Today’s article focuses on the user experience, to make sure we understand how the app has changed and what each type of user that accesses Spotify encounters. The next part will be on the publisher side, covering those on Megaphone, Spotify for Creators, and other leading hosting platforms, as there is a lot of confusion about how video can be approached on Spotify.

The second is an event, our first stand-alone topic-focused event, scheduled for May 5th and hosted at the Headgum Studios in Los Angeles, CA. There are so many amazing events that our industry should be attending, so I want to make it crystal clear that our intention with events like this is only to run them when needed. When there’s a topic so important that we need to come together and discuss the finer details of it, we’ll host one. And that’s exactly what this first event will be.

To ensure we can have valuable discussions, this event will be capped at around 60 attendees, with topics kicked off by key individuals in the video podcasting space.

Those individuals will lead the conversations, sharing examples and candid details about their video successes and failures, creating clarity on how video podcasting currently works across all platforms, and most importantly: getting all of us on the same page about our wants and needs from each of the video platforms so that we can collectively ask for them as an unavoidable unified front.

This event will be open to one person per Sounds Profitable partner company. The price of admission will be each company bringing a Brand with them, not an agency or holding company, as their guest.  With 20% of the Sounds Profitable partnership base coming from the advertising demand side, we have a substantial representation of voices from that space. That said, every single partner we work with benefits from bringing more brands in the room. You can sign up here for consideration.

And for those who are not currently partners, maybe that’s because we haven’t been too clear on all the benefits of partnership. I encourage you to ask any of the nearly 200 partners you see listed at the bottom of our newsletters (or site) the value their entire company gets from being a partner. In nearly five years, we haven’t changed the price of $500/m (nor do we intend to), but every year we add more and more benefits for our partners and push the industry into bigger and better spaces. Hit reply if you’d like to discuss it further.

And now, to the article.

The User

Spotify Video only exists on the Spotify App, so the three main characters from the User side of this story will be the Spotify Premium user, the Non-Premium user, and the Guest user (someone who does not sign in). Spotify Premium, at the time of writing, costs $11.99 per month, and is paid for by 263 million of the 675 million total Spotify users.

The Guest user plays a small but important part. This user can only play podcasts on the website, and the experience is entirely audio. To listen to or watch podcasts on any of Spotify’s apps, regardless of premium status, you must have an account.

Discovery

On the mobile app, when browsing through the podcast section of the home tab, a video starts playing when you center on a specific show. For audio-only podcasts, that video is presented as a waveform with the cover art of the show. For video podcasts, it’s the beginning of an episode. Both experiences autoplay on mute by default, with subtitles. While you can toggle the audio on or off, you can’t stop the video from playing if it’s still on screen. Here’s where the format starts to change the experience the most.

An audio podcast plays a preview of around 1 minute (we’ve seen variations from 00:57-1:06, so the preview does not cut off mid-sentence), and either plays from the absolute beginning of the episode or a specific section set by either Spotify or the podcaster. Scrolling down and back up restarts the clip, with no way to continue listening to the full episode from where you left the clip. While some audio podcasts are uploading video clips (not full videos) that can be seen within the specific episode page, this auto-play preview doesn’t use them.

Video podcasts immediately autoplay the episode the second you scroll onto the panel. Scrolling off and back on, the video continues exactly where you left off, which is the same experience when you press play. There is no preview for video podcasts, you simply begin watching the episode and can choose to continue or not.

On my personal account, this page was almost entirely audio podcasts because that’s what I follow and have listened to. On a brand new test account I created, it was full of video podcasts, including numerous videos with absolutely no words that are being allowed on as podcasts, as well as reports of pornographic videos rising to the top of the charts.

Outside of this specific view, and the areas of the app focused on showing video clips of the podcasts partaking of that product, the rest of the app is unchanged experience wise between audio and video podcasts.

Consumption

Starting or continuing a video podcast kicks you over to the video player. There is an incredibly clear “Switch to Audio” button that, if pressed, does load an audio-specific file seamlessly to reduce data transfer (h/t to James Cridland of Podnews for discovering this). When you press “Switch to Video” there’s a little bit of a hiccup, but an otherwise perfect switch happens between the two formats. That hiccup is also present when you’re playing a video, turn the screen off, and then turn it back on.

For the Spotify Premium user, the only ads they’ll experience are those that are integrated into the episode by the podcaster at time of upload.

For the Non-Premium user, they’ll experience a visual change if they have the Now Playing page open when an ad break occurs. At the time of writing this, a static image appears, regardless of whether you’re watching or listening, and a new audio file is played. Just like a new song or video, the entire progress bar updates to the new length, and the user can scrub to the end to skip it. These ads can be from Spotify as well as from the Podcaster themselves.

Wrapping It Up

While we ran through three different types of users above, there’s a different split that all of us need to keep in mind when thinking about Spotify Video: existing users and new users.

My experience as an existing user of Spotify was….fine. As I’m not particularly looking for video and use the app entirely for audio, primarily music, then audiobooks, then podcasts, the changes aren’t staggering to me and they make sense. They’re not disruptive. They’re interesting. And everything recommended to me aligned with the years of data Spotify has on me to craft their suggestions of what I should be consuming next. I’m optimistic that Spotify won’t be making recommendations that conflict with my profile, just to drive more attention to video, for my personal account.

But the new user experience is what we all need to pay attention to.

In fact, I encourage all of you to sign out of your Spotify account and create a new account. Take the account creation process seriously, selecting the podcasts and music you care about, and use that account for the next month or two. Because in the new user experience, video was far more in my face than audio. Spotify’s goals with video feels targeted at the audience of people who consume video on YouTube, and what we cover in the next article further emphasized that point on the publisher side of things. So with the userbase of YouTube being quite a bit larger than Spotify, it’s important to fully understand what the app is prioritizing to those new accounts and how that may ultimately impact the business of podcasting.

Audiobook consumption on Spotify didn’t seem to rock the boat for podcast downloads, but video podcasts and the deluge of new video content being uploaded may lure away existing users and completely captivate new users, making the task of discovery even more difficult. Collecting and watching your data in moments like this is critical.

With one half of the equation covered, we’re working hard to finalize the second part, and expect it to be out the week after Evolutions by Podcast Movement. It’s a lot to digest, but we believe that it will clarify quite a bit for the podcast industry, allowing more people to make their decision on how they do or don’t want to adopt video on Spotify.